LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers. You, too, can also get involved!

LibreOffice in Arch Linux

LibreOffice is the "Document Foundation" fork, located in Official_Repositories, which includes enhancements and features.

Installation

Stable version

Ensure that the fonts ttf-dejavu and artwiz-fonts are installed before continuing, otherwise LibreOffice will display rectangles instead of text.

Download and install the base for stable and/or beta and/or devel:

# pacman -S libreoffice

Since version 3.4.2rc1, LibreOffice has been split. The install will give you a menu prompting for which components to install. As the language pack for en-US is no longer included by default, you will need to install at least 1 language pack. The default language is Afrikaans (because it is alphabetically the first provider of libreoffice-langpack), the previous default (en-US) is at number 24:

Theme

Note: Qt integration is able to mimic gtk theme. The command qtconfig-qt4 opens a window which let you choose.

Note: Even if you are not running one of these desktop environments and thus do not need to "integrate" with them, you may still wish to install these packages so that libreoffice will use non-default gtk or qt themes. For example, libreoffice on e17 uses the default "ugly" (aka "win95") theme; installing libreoffice-gnome will allow you to select a more pleasant gtk theme.

As of LibreOffice version 3.5.x it tries to magically autodetect your desktop UI using the following magic if proper libs will be found:

It is convenient to save SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN variable in your shell configuration file, e.g./etc/bash.bashrc or ~/.bashrc if using bash.

Note: The new gtk3 UI is still marked upstream as experimental and will only be available if you enable "experimental features" in LibO main configuration dialog.

However, if it looks like it's using Windows 98 icons, go to Tools -> Options -> Accessibility and uncheck "Automatically detect high contrast mode of the system".

Personas themes

Libreoffice 4.x series is able to use Firefox personas.
Enter Libreoffice options and choose "Personalization", "Select Personas", then paste the URL of your favourite one. A convenient button in the dialog box lets you open the browser.

Extension management

Arch is shipping some additional extensions. We currently ship these extensions: nlpsolver, presentation-minimizer, report-builder, wiki-publisher. You can install them with pacman:

Note: Languagetool uses java and may slow down or briefly hang LibreOffice, particularly while opening documents. Fortunately this is usually only when initially opening a document and is usually not apparent otherwise.
Openjdk6 seems to get the better results than openjdk7 with LanguageTool, although this is unconfirmed.

Installing Macros

If you intend to use macros, you must have a JRE enabled, use of a JRE is default behaviour. But disabling it speeds up the program.

The default path for macros in Arch Linux is different from most Linux distributions. Its location is

~/.config/libreoffice/4/user/Scripts/

Speed up LibreOffice

Some settings may improve LibreOffice's loading time and responsiveness. However, some also increase RAM usage, so use them carefully. They can all be accessed under Tools -> Options.

Under Memory:

Reduce the number of Undo steps to a figure lower than 100, to something like 20 or 30 steps.

Under Graphics cache, set Use for LibreOffice to 128 MB (up from the original 20MB).

Set Memory per object to 20MB (up from the default 5MB).

If you use LibreOffice often, check LibreOffice Quickstarter.

Note: you need to have the package libreoffice-gnome installed for this option to be available

Troubleshooting

Font substitution

These settings can be changed in the LibreOffice options. From the drop-down menu, select Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice -> Fonts. Check the box that says Apply Replacement Table. Type Andale Sans UI in the font box and choose your desired font for the Replace with option. When done, click the checkmark. Then choose the Always and Screen only options in the box below. Click OK.
You will then need to go to Tools -> Options -> LibreOffice -> View, and uncheck "Use system font for user interface". If you use a non-antialised font, such as Arial, you will also need to uncheck "Screen font antialiasing" before menu fonts render correctly.

LibreOffice does not detect my certificates

If you cannot see the certificates when trying to sign a document, you will need to have the certificates configured in Mozilla Firefox (or Thunderbird). If after that LibreOffice still does not show them, set the MOZILLA_CERTIFICATE_FOLDER environment variable to point to your Mozilla Firefox (or Thunderbird) folder.